


islands

by balconys



Category: Free!
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Haruka Nanase thinks too much, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 12:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4019569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/balconys/pseuds/balconys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year Haruka turns twenty-two, he gets his college degree, a haircut, a tabby the color of yolk, and a fixture in the house in the shape of Matsuoka Rin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	islands

**Author's Note:**

> repost from tumblr

Lately the summers that whirl into the countryside are ruthless. Outside the pavement glows bone-white, shadows stretching lazily across roads that disappear into the reclusion of trees, past juvenile scrawls of tic-tac-toes and _Mio loves Takeshi_ in orange chalk. Strange how easily things have changed. The year Haruka turns twenty-two, he gets his college degree, a haircut, a tabby the color of yolk, and a fixture in the house in the shape of Matsuoka Rin.

Stranger still, how the man lingers around the halls like day-old chlorine Haruka always forgets to rinse off. He brings home watermelon and pizza and hogs the couch, sings shamelessly in the shower at 8:00 in the morning while Haruka makes them breakfast. The lulls are easier now, easier to fill; just a smooth weave of motion until the lapses in between grow light, like slipping into pools, like breathing. He wonders about that. Matsuoka Rin, Olympic superstar, now sprawled on a frayed couch watching the sports section of the news when he could be anywhere else. Here, in his kitchen, where he has to settle for a poorly maintained pool in Haruka’s backyard when there is a perfectly good one waiting for him back in Tokyo, back where the world is, where he belongs. Not here. This place Haruka calls home is a little too sleepy, a little too quiet for a boy like Matsuoka Rin (and sometime in the past it hadn’t been enough.) And yet, here he is: Why? It’s a question that sticks, curling itself into memory, unwinding at odd moments in the day.

One Monday he wakes up with a humming silence filling the corners of his house, and he trips out of bed with something like fear perhaps, stopping right outside the kitchen door to be rewarded with a view of Rin pouring cereal into a starfish-patterned bowl, Momo’s tail swishing happily around his ankles. The sight is so frighteningly domestic, Haruka walks right back into bed and spends the next few minutes staring aimlessly at the ceiling, ignoring the implications.

Sometimes he forgets that other people are allowed to like Rin too. He sees the man in billboards now, his smile a familiar glint along highways, BE A CHAMPION in bold, blocked letters emblazoned over parking lots, grocery counters. The companies love him. Japan loves him. The entire world, in fact, is madly in love with the boy from some nameless fishing town and his breathless, ocean laugh and his eyes and legs that go on for weeks and weeks.

Yet, there are things they will never see; Haruka thinks Rin looks better like this, splayed beneath a patch of salmon-colored light, looking like something that tumbled out of the surf. Haruka is twenty-two and Rin still reminds him of open windows and running shoes and skies unfolding infinitely beyond their heads, into oceans of their own. Tomorrow, he will allow himself to wonder about this, about how much longer Rin will allow him to steal him away, but right now time is elastic. Rin burns beneath him, a slow, writhing heat that leaves him scrabbling against the sheets, temple fire, breath like prayers born between the spaces.

“Haru–” the word crumbles against his ear like a rolling wave, down the jut of his collarbone. Rin feels too illusory, like he always does in his dreams, golden, arching like molten wax. _Tomorrow_ , Haruka wonders. “Shit–” Rin heaves over them, the swelling tide, and Haruka breaks and breaks and breaks.


End file.
